Wtf vw?

Seriously? You just fucked the future of diesel cars in America.

Their sales have been in decline since 2012. This will not help.

They’ve also pulled all their diesel commercials from youtube. Presumably form TV as well, which would be wonderful.

Their sales have been in decline since 2012. This will not help.

They’ve also pulled all their diesel commercials from youtube. Presumably from TV as well, which would be wonderful.

Holy crap. That seems like a pretty big deal; it’ll be interesting to see what the fallout is of this. How will it impact owners? If the software actually ran would it have impacted performance or mileage? Once the cars are fixed in the recall will owners be left with a “lesser” car? If so, may be some class action lawsuits to follow.

The FTC will also jump in, you know, for all that fake fucking advertising.

And the consumer lawsuits will be legendary.

LOL:

The U.S. government also has reason to feel duped: Volkswagen’s “clean diesel” TDI engines earned a $1,300 federal tax credit for people who purchased a Jetta sedan or wagon back in 2009, the first year affected by the recall.

[. . .]

Installed in four-cylinder cars, the software, which the EPA calls a “defeat device” that’s meant to trick official tests, allowed diesel Jettas, Beetles and other cars to “emit up to 40 times more pollution” than allowed under U.S. emission standards.

Put the hammer to em.

Man, for that little stunt the responsible corporate officers should be arrested and the company should be put into receivership. If this was Honda or even Mazda I think the entire board would commit suicide.

If the 40x figure is true, I’m going to demand no less than a bag of hammers. I’m pretty upset about this news.

This is pretty amazing. I thought at first that it must be some kind of error that slipped through, but on further reading it sounds like some key VW people knew exactly what was going on and that it was all according to plan.

If you’re a senior or executive vice president, IMO there is no way you would ever order this done without backing from above. The CEO had to know. But I’m really amazed it took so long to be revealed. Quite a number of managers and engineers had to know about it.

There’s a good question if VW was doing this to their European models, too. Things could get ugly real fast in Wolfsburg.

Apparently, you cheat on emissions to get around the requirement for urea injection, without which it’s very hard to hit NOx targets.

Just a reminder that we have a P&R thread on this as well, which is where I’ll be posting my demands for satisfaction over this absolutely disgusting news :(

Assuming they kept legal out of the loop the entire time, I imagine a bunch of corporate lawyers losing their shit in German at everyone responsible right now.

I dunno. Considering what Porsche did to the markets back in '08 or whenever it was when they secretly acquired most VW shares, I don’t know if the lawyers are holding them back or helping them.

Cue angry Hitler.

“…These devices, essentially, let the cars pretend to not break the law. The software could sense when the car was undergoing emissions testing and activate its pollution-control systems accordingly…”

Fine German engineering. I am truly curious as to how it could “sense” that emissions testing was going on. In Connecticut, they just stick a probe into the tailpipe and run the car on rollers. I assume from this that most states do something more electronic-like?

In Washington, they plug into the OBD (onboard diagnostic) port and download the emissions data.

Yes, overseen by a Supervisory Board which has legal obligations about this sort of corporate behaviour.

The emissions reduction almost certainly has some significant impact impact on performance, necessitating them not running it most of the time.